Kris D'Amico Photography

September 8th, 2009 by Kris

I am always faced with that little thing called “color space”. Adobe 1998, sRGB IEC61966-2.1, ProPhoto RGB, and those are just the options coming out of Lightroom!! Alright well, as most of us know, use Adobe 1998 for print and sRGB for web right? Well, yes and no. Back in the day the photog would just drop off the film with a contact sheet marked or a sheet of sleeved chromes with their favorites marked and call it a day. Color space and reproduction was the realm of  Senior AD’s, plate burners, and pressmen. Now, that we’ve got this new digital world, I’ve found that no one really understands the what’s and where’s of the color spaces. So this is a short guide to those who don’t want to decipher the Wiki pages that read like a college physics book!

Adobe 1998

• Adobe (photoshop, illustrator, etc) invented this is 1998
• The color “mimic” the CMYK printable space
• Best use: Going to Print and you don’t know where or how!

sRGB IEC61966-2.1

• Created in by HP and Microsoft in 1996
• Can also be called Windows RGB
• This color space is designed for use on monitors, home printers, and the web
• sRGB is specifically designed for use with dimly lit monitors and TV’s, that’s right broadcast.
• Basically, if you’ve got a LaCie or another color “correct” or “CRT Gambit” monitor you can see more color than sRGB spits out; if you’ve got a run of the mill Costco special like me (22″ Samsung, yeah baby!) then you’ll never see the color from the more robust profiles on screen.
• That means, if you are delivering via the web, ESPECIALLY if you’re end user is going to be looking at the pics with Internet Explorer , use this space.

ProPhoto RGB

• Designed by Kodak to encompass 90% of all possible reproducible colors.
• Also called ROMM RGB
• By far the largest color space, in fact it’s so big it actually covers “imaginary colors”; colors that exist mathematically, but either don’t exist or are not viewable by the human eye.
• One thing to note if you are an 8-bit editing person, you’ll want to step up to 16-bit editing for this one; just suffice it to say with 8-bit you can run into gradients being replaced with several regions of fewer tones, then you get those abrupt change from one tone to another – banding or posterization.
• The long and short is use this for output to the 24×36 art prints

ColorMatch RGB

• Very similar in color tone as sRGB, just an older format, it’s based on colors from an old format called the Radius PressView display
• Only use this if it’s specifically requested. sRBG and Adobe 1998 are more accurate.

Apple RGB and Generic RGB

• These color spaces are usually based on non color managed docs
• if a file comes in as one of these formats, I’d consider the output and switching the profile.
• On a technical note unless you’re dealing with a graphical file from another app, you should never have a photo fall into this color space. Stick with Adobe1998 or sRGB!

Those are the big ones, of course there are plenty more and then there are the CMYK colors spaces and how RGB interacts when inserted into a CMYK, but that’s for another day!!

Quick recap:

1. Adobe 1998: General Print Usage
2. sRGB IEC61966-2.1: General Web Usage, especially IE 6 and 7
3. ProPhoto RGB: Art Prints, Printers that can handle the extra colors
4. ColorMatch RGB: use only if requested; very similar to sRGB
5. Apple RGB and Generic RGB: use only if requested; switch over to sRGB or Apple 1998